Vegan living and plant-based cooking

Tag: vegan

I don’t have too many time today, so I’m just sharing one of my favorite recipes out of the fall edition of our magazine: De Groene Keuken Magazine Herfst 2014. It’s a delicious, comforting and warming breakfast recipe, that tastes lovely on a windy and rainy fall morning (because, yes, it’s fall)!

I also shared this Oatmeal with apple from the oven with Compassionate Cooking. If you’re going to make this dish, you can rate it over there. But of course, I also love to hear what you have to say about it here. Happy fall!

Preheat the oven at 180°C.
Mix the oatmeal, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg together in a big bowl. Add the flax seed, almond milk, maple syrup and vanilla extract and mix everything together.
Chop up the walnuts and add half of them, along with the raisins to the mixture. Slice or even grate the apples finely and add them as well.
Mix well together and put everything in an oven dish of approx. 24 x 14 cm. Sprinkle the remaining walnuts over the oven dish.
Put it in the oven for 30 to 35 minutes.

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When I was thinking about a traditional Belgian dish, I immediately thought about seitan stew or vol-au-vent , but since I already used these two dishes for VeganMoFo, I had to think about something else… After spending some time on google I thought about ‘knapkoeken’ (cookies) or smurfentaart (smurfs pie – it’s an apricot pie topped with cream and white chocolate). But eventually I thought about rice pudding! Rice pudding might not be traditional for the area I live in, but it is a typical Belgian dessert. We already ate rice pudding in the 16th century, as shown in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting ‘De Boerenbruiloft’ (The Peasant Wedding). In this painting a kid is licking it’s bowl and I completely understand this when I’ve just finished a bowl of rice pudding. In Belgium there’s this saying that even in heaven they eat a bowl of rice pudding every day, with golden spoons.

Rice pudding

6 portions

150 gr dessert rice (or risotto rice)

900 ml oat- or almond milk 1 bag vanilla sugar or 1 vanilla pod

50 gr brown sugar

pinch of salt

if desired, some saffron

1 tbsp vanille pudding powder

if desired, some cinnamon or extra brown sugar

Bring all ingredients, except for the pudding powder and extra sugar/cinnamon, to a boil on medium heat. Let it simmer for about 40 minutes and stir regularly.

In the last 3 minutes you add the pudding powder and you keep stirring.

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I often cook for non-vegans, whether they’re friends or family, or for bake sales… It depends on who’s coming for dinner, but I often make my eggplant lasagne first. It’s one of those dishes which makes me happy and it’s a perfect dish for the last eggplants of the season. Of course you can swap the eggplants for another vegetable. Bell peppers or zucchini are very delicious in this lasagne. But here I combine the eggplant with spinach and (brown) mushrooms.

Preheat the oven at 180 °C. Cut the eggplant into slices and spread them in an oven dish. Pour some oil and sprinkle some seasoning salt over the eggplant. Put this in the oven for about 25 min. Chop the onion finely and cook it over low heat. Add the basil, oregano and cayenne pepper. After half an hour you can add the mushrooms and spinach. After an additional 5 min you add the diced tomatoes.

While the eggplant is in the oven you can prepare your béchamel sauce. Put the cashews and the 2 cloves of garlic in a blender or food processor and blend. Add the mustard, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, pepper, salt and nutmeg. Add the milk gradually and mix everything in the meantime. Continue until you have a smooth paste.

Preheat the oven at 220°C. Cover the bottom of a large oven dish with a layer of the tomato-spinach-mushroom sauce. On top of the sauce you put a layer of lasagna noodles, followed by another layer of tomato sauce, a layer of eggplant slices, a layer of tomato sauce, a layer of lasagna noodles. You repeat this until al ingredients are used (3 to 4 layers). Make sure there’s some tomato sauce left to put on top. Finally you can pour over the béchamel sauce over the whole dish. Put the lasagna in the oven at 220°C for about 40 min.

* Tip 1: You don’t have any lasagna noodles? Just use macaroni or penne or any other kind of pasta: pour half of the pasta in an oven dish, pour half of the tomato sauce on it, place the slices of eggplant on the pasta+sauce, pour over the other half of the sauce and the last half of the pasta, spread the béchamel sauce over the pasta. Just as good! Always be careful when buying lasagna noodles, since they are often made with eggs compared to other kinds of pasta.

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Until today I didn’t know what my ‘most retro recipe’ would be… And just now I realized that I have the perfect recipe for the Vegan MoFo theme of today… VOL-AU-VENT! I think it’s the easiest to translate it as biscuits and gravy, but here in Belgium we call it Vol-au-Vent, Vidé or Koninginnehapje (queen’s appetizer). I made a vegan recipe for this delicious dish about a year ago, to appear in the second edition of our vegan magazine, De Groene Keuken. We even put it in the preview, ’cause I’m so proud of it (and think it’s incredibly delicious). The funny thing is that I really hated the dish when I was a kid, but now I love it! The combinatie of the creamy filling and the puff pastry cookie is so yum!

Vol-au-vent might be one of the most retro recipes here in Belgium. Everyone knows it, it’s on the menu in almost every restaurant and you can find it in your grandparents cookbooks. Of course I made a vegan version that’s not only more delicious, but also way healthier.

Braise the onion in some vegan butter on low heat. Add the garlic, herbs and mushrooms and let it simmer.
If you prefer to bake your chick’npieces or seitan first, add them to the mushrooms.

Add the cognac, cream, stock and lemon juice to the mushrooms. Let it thicken on low heat for about 20 minutes.

Preheat the oven on 120°C. Take 2 serving rings / food molds of a different size. Cut out 6 circles with the largest mold. Take two of these circles and cut out 2 small rounds with the smaller mold. Don’t throw away the big, hollow circles. Put two of the large circles on top of each other and repeat this. Top these with a large hollow circle. Keep the small circle as a hat for your puff pastry biscuit. Place them on baking paper on an oven dish. Put them in the oven for 15 minutes.

Take the puff pastry biscuits and pour in the filling. Finish with some fresh parsley or thyme and the puff pastry hat. Serve with potato croquettes and a green salad.

* For a list of vegan cognac, you can check Barnivore.
** Be careful when buying potato croquettes, they often contain eggs. Be sure to check the ingredients!

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One of my favourite tv-series ever is The Sopranos. At first it seemed like it wasn’t my cup of tea, misogynistic maffiosi… But soon the show grew on me. The humor, the acting, the setting, the language, I loved everything about it. Of course I also loved the Italian cuisine. A lot of the dishes contain meat, but: anything you can eat, I can eat vegan! The dish I remembered the most was baked ziti. In the fourth season Bobby Baccalieri’s wife, Karen, dies. Bobby saves her last baked ziti in the freezer ’till he’s ready to eat it. The dish is mentioned in a lot of other episodes.

Baked ziti is a classic Italian pasta dish with a tomato-meat sauce and lots of cheese. Not particularly a vegan dish… but that’s what I like to veganize! I based myself on this recipe from The Sopranos Family Cookbook. I made balls from seitan and TVP, used my homemade vegan cheese and used penne in stead of ziti (simply because I only had penne at home). The result was lovely: delicious tomato sauce, a nice variety with the soyballs and a delightful creamy plant based cheese!

To make the balls you mix the TVP with the paprika and pour the hot veggie stock over it. Let it rest for a few minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients, except for the vital wheat gluten, and mix. Add the vital wheat gluten, mix and knead. Let it rest for 10 minutes. Make small balls out of it and roll them into a cheesecloth (muslin) or tinfoil. Steam for about 20 minutes. Take the balls out of the cloth and place them on a baking dish. Put them in the oven on 180°C for 15 minutes.

Make the tomato sauce by braising the onion ’till it’s soft. Add all the other ingredients and let it simmer on low heat.

Add the balls to the sauce and let it simmer for about 15 minutes.

For the vegan cheese: place all the ingredients in a blender and blend ’till it’s all liquid. (If your coconut oil wasn’t melted, it can seem like the cheese ‘sauce’ is curdled, but when you heat it up it will become completely fluid). Pour all of it into a small cooking pan and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly. Once the structure gets more firm and become a little bit stretchy like dairy cheese, your vegan cheese is ready.

Mix the pasta with the balls and tomato sauce and put half of it in a casserole/oven dish. Drizzle about 1/3 of the vegan cheese over the pasta and pour the rest of the pasta with sauce on it. Spread the rest of the vegan cheese all over the pasta. Put it in the oven (180°C) for about 15 to 20 minutes. Serve with fresh basil.

If you would like some more veggies in this pasta dish, you can always add some bell pepper and eggplant.

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Nothing beats homemade pizza dough, but sometimes it’s so damn easy to use a store bought pizza crust. There are some shops here in Belgium where you can buy a pre-made pizza crust. They taste pretty good, they keep in the fridge for a long time and you can even freeze them.

Most of the time I throw whatever’s available on my pizza. Onions, olives and artichokes are standard in our household. But a pizza is even better when I add some bell peppers and mushrooms. Yesterday I made a pizza with a pre-made crust and it only took 20 minutes (chopping, preparing and oven time included)!

(Oh yeah, I know that in the US there are frozen vegan pizza’s options. Here in Belgium, we’re not that lucky…)

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When I was a kid, my mom often made this delicious pasta dish with braised onion and baked bacon, I absolutely loved it! I enjoyed it most when there wasn’t too much onion in it, white fusilli pasta, small bits of well-done bacon and lots of cheese.

Of course it’s been ages ago that I ate the original dish. About two years ago I made a vegan version with backon bits from the Vegetarian Butcher and grated cheese from Wilmersburger, but it didn’t hit the right spot. Last week I was suddenly craving this dish, so I made another vegan version, from scratch. I made ‘bacon’ out of seitan and ‘cheese’ based on tapioca starch and nutritional yeast (what else?)… it was exactly what I was looking for. I added some broccoli to get in my veggies. Unlike my days as a pre-teen, I now love this dish with lots of onion, crispy smoked seitan, a little bit of my homemade melty vegan cheese and some broccoli thrown in. Actually my current version is better then the one I remember out of my childhood, cause not only is it delicious, it’s also healthier and, very important, it’s totally cruelty free!
You should definitely try this one!

For the seitan: mix the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients, mix everything together.
Knead the dough for a few minutes and let it rest for 10 minutes.
Knead the dough again and cut 4 equally sized pieces out of the dough. Wrap each piece of seitan dough into a cheese cloth or in foil and steam for 30 minutes.

For the vegan cheese: place all the ingredients in a blender and blend ’till it’s all liquid. (If your coconut oil wasn’t melted, it can seem like the cheese ‘sauce’ is curdled, but when you heat it up it will become completely fluid). Pour all of it into a small cooking pan and bring the mixture to a boil, stirring constantly. Once the structure gets more firm and become a little bit stretchy like dairy cheese, your vegan cheese is ready.

Sauté the onion in a little bit of oil and some salt on low heat until it is lightly caramelized. Steam the broccoli.

Meanwhile, take two of the four pieces of seitan and slice them into small cubes. Bake until crispy in a little bit of oil.

Add the seitan bacon, pasta, onion and broccoli in a large oven dish and mix together. Then spread out the vegan cheese over the pasta and put it in an oven of 180 ° C for 15 minutes.

* If you don’t have any vegan Worcestershire sauce, replace 1 tbsp of it with 2 tsp soy sauce, 1/4 tsp lemon juice, 1/4 tsp sugar and a pinch of cayenne pepper.

You will notice that there are two pieces of seitan bacon left. You can slice them up, fry them and serve them with some potatoes and vegetables, but it is also delicious with a tofu scramble or between a sandwich with tomato, lettuce, ketchup or barbecue sauce and fried onion.